The continued drama at Twitter has been good for business at rival social network Mastodon.
Mastodon’s active user base has soared from 300,000 to 2.5 million between October and November, founder Eugen Rochko wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. That means Mastodon has more than doubled in size from Nov. 7, when its active user base crossed 1 million.
Rochko supplied the numbers to highlight the appeal of Mastodon, days after Twitter started blocking users from sharing links to Mastodon. This included preventing people from posting a Mastodon link in their profile page on the pretense that it represented malware.
Rochko says the whole episode underscores fundamental problems with Twitter. “This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” he wrote.
Last Thursday, Twitter also suspended the official @joinmastodon account for tweeting out a link to the Mastodon profile of @ElonJet, which had recently been banned from Twitter. On top of all this, the company also suspended several journalists for their reporting on the Mastodon and @ElonJet suspensions, even though Elon Musk said he bought Twitter to prioritize free speech. (Musk later claimed the reporters were guilty of “doxxing” him.)
Over the weekend, Twitter then escalated the matter by announcing it would ban links to rival social networks, although the exact policy was fuzzy. By day's end, however, Twitter seemingly backtracked on that plan, deleting tweets and a help center page about the link-ban rule. The platform has also lifted the block on sharing Mastodon links to Twitter and reinstated the @joinmastodon account.
In the meantime, Rochko argues his own social network provides a better alternative to Twitter. In contrast, Mastodon operates over a decentralized collection of independent Mastodon servers, making it akin to email, but for social media. “It also gives you the freedom to choose a social media provider the same way you would choose a telephone, internet, or e-mail provider, and to move from one to the other while retaining your followers,” he says.
Rocko then signaled that Twitter’s decision to suspend journalists is causing many news outlets to flock to Mastodon. “Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world,” he says.
Despite the growth at Mastodon, Twitter still dwarfs Mastodon with 238 million monetizable daily users as of Q2.